Studies with impossible languages falsify LMs as models of human language

November 14, 2025 ยท Declared Dead ยท ๐Ÿ› arXiv.org

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Authors Jeffrey S. Bowers, Jeff Mitchell arXiv ID 2511.11389 Category cs.CL: Computation & Language Citations 0 Venue arXiv.org Last Checked 6 months ago
Abstract
According to Futrell and Mahowald [arXiv:2501.17047], both infants and language models (LMs) find attested languages easier to learn than impossible languages that have unnatural structures. We review the literature and show that LMs often learn attested and many impossible languages equally well. Difficult to learn impossible languages are simply more complex (or random). LMs are missing human inductive biases that support language acquisition.
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